Intro to Map Design Tools
When presenting geographic information through a map, elements of graphic design are crucial to creating a meaningful final product. These elements range from how elements on the map are laid out to the visual characteristics of the individual elements. Good map design takes into consideration audience, purpose, and presentation medium and picks the right elements to connect all of these aspects together to tell a cohesive story.
The most important graphical elements to keep in mind are visual contrast, legibility, figure-ground organization, hierarchical organization, and balance. Visual contrast, legibility and figure-ground organization can help visually guide the audience through the hierarchical organization of your map as well as keeping the elements balanced throughout the presentation. How you use these elements of design will depend on the purpose of the map and the medium it is presented in. A projector display will require higher contrast and a more simplified structure than a map to be printed in a book which can be more nuanced and detailed design-wise.
Finally, when you are finished with your map the choice of export file type is also depended on the purpose of the map. All file types either fall in the raster or vector category. Raster is most commonly used for web display (JPEG, TIFF) however it is hard to edit or work on a raster file. Exporting as a vector file will allow other people or yourself to continue working on or editing the map (illustrator files are vector form).
With that quick summary, let's explore some of the types of maps you can create using ArcMap's design tools. As I fiddle with the beginning tools of map design within the software I will include tips on functions that I found to be helpful and interesting.
Basic Point, Line, and Polygon Design
One of the basic forms of mapping is vector, like I discussed earlier, and these mapped through point, line and polygon features. Along with these different features come a multitude of design options such as fill, outline, shape, and label. Within a features properties, the symbology and label tabs allow for a variety of design changes related to certain attributes. Something that I thought was interesting and a good resource for both beginners and more advanced map designers is the Style References option. This menu gives you predefined styles depending on things like zoning or land-use features. This is one way you could make your map more universally recognizable or also guide you on what types of design choices to make.
Another unique feature you can use with this type of map design is a definition query. The query is built from the selected attribute along with a logical operator like = or > and unique values of the attribute. This is a function that instructs the software what class of features to display. For example, within the buildings feature on your map you could specify only residential and government buildings display on this layer. The definition query is useful in map design because from there you can pull out these different classes in using the symbology function and give them their own unique appearance on the map.
Another way to design a map is as a choropleth map. Because you cannot show continuous variation with points or polygons, this type of map uses color to fill polygons that represent certain numeric attribute values. This works through the assignment of break values that tell the map when to switch to a new color polygon depending on attribute value. Natural breaks (Jenks) are the automatic assignment chosen by ArcGIS, however you will almost always assign your own values when creating this type of map.
This technique is not only applicable to polygons, you can also create a graduated point map that operates on the same principles. Here are a few different ways of creating a choropleth map:
Normalized maps: uses percentages to calculate how much of an attribute is occurring (numerator attribute/denominator attribute)
Density maps: uses area to calculate how much of an attribute is occurring
Dot density maps: use points to visualize the concentration of attributes
Fishnet maps: uses uniform, square, polygons (cells) that aggregate point data into cell summaries. This helps drive your perception only by color and not by the shape of the polygon. (rasterizes it?)
It's important to note that you don't have to repeat your hard work picking colors over and over when you update a map or create a new one. For easy access to prior styling, you can save layer styles and then import then onto another layer.
Lingering Questions/Problems
Problem: When putting a label on a layer I created using the definition query, the label seemed to only random apply itself to a few of the feature points and not all of the points on the layer.
Resolution: I then found if I zoomed in on the layer I could see all of the labels.
Remaining question: is there a way to ensure that all labels show up no matter what extent you are zoomed to?
What do the different classification techniques for graduated colors and symbols mean? (ex: quantile)
I don't understand what the purpose of a layer package is, is it just the same as saving a single layer but saving a layer grouping?
